


also something rich and strange

by wrishwrosh



Series: [bat emoji] [2]
Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Vampire, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-16
Updated: 2020-03-16
Packaged: 2021-02-26 15:04:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23167258
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wrishwrosh/pseuds/wrishwrosh
Summary: There are upsides and downsides of dating a vamp. Pros: EJ doesn’t need to breathe. Cons: EJ never needs to catch his breath.
Relationships: Erik Johnson/Nathan MacKinnon
Series: [bat emoji] [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1665310
Comments: 42
Kudos: 229





	also something rich and strange

**Author's Note:**

> what's up boys, everything's bad and crazy right now so i wrote a bunch more vampire jokes. pls enjoy.
> 
> title from oceanica by san fermin.

“Always with the fucking outdoor games,” EJ grumbles, scrolling through his email on Nate’s laptop. “It better be cloudy, is all I can say.”

Nate lifts his head up from where he was mashing his face into EJ’s thigh. EJ is a categorically terrible pillow, but Nate got elbowed in the jaw at practice and right now his leg is serving as a decent ice pack. “I don’t think they have any control over that,” he says.

“Built a whole entire windowless indoor arena and they don’t even let us play in it. What’s the point, huh?” Nate refrains from mentioning the 81 games they are playing inside this season. He doesn’t think EJ would find that especially helpful.

“Huh,” says Nate.

“Do they _know _what the sun is like at this altitude? It’s fucking thoughtless, is what it is. I should call somebody.”

“Talk to the Player’s Association about it.”

“Ha,” EJ barks. He picks up the laptop and resettles it on top of Nate’s head. It buzzes hot in his ear, which is sort of counterproductive. He taps on EJ’s knee, but either vampirism inhibits regular reflexes or EJ’s just a bastard, because he doesn’t respond.

“You don’t actually turn into a pile of ash if you go in the sun, right?” Nate asks from under the laptop.

“Might as well,” says EJ darkly. 

Nate eyes the ray of sun coming directly through the uncovered window and landing on EJ’s face. “Shut up,” EJ says. “The windows are treated.”

“Didn’t say anything, bud,” says Nate, shifting his face down closer to EJ’s knee, where it’s still cold. EJ bounces his leg and moves the laptop.

+

“Hey,” EJ says, “you want me to bite you?”

“What?” says Nate, who came about twenty seconds ago and isn’t quite back online yet. There are upsides and downsides of fucking a vamp. Pros: EJ doesn’t need to breathe. Cons: EJ never needs to catch his breath.

“Biting? You wanna get bitten?”

“What, right now?”

EJ looks disdainfully around Nate’s bedroom. “I mean, if you want to explain the mess to your cleaning lady. Nah, I meant later.”

Nate thought that the amount of time he spends staring EJ directly in the fangs would have made his answer to that question pretty damn clear. However, he also thought that EJ wasn’t into that. “I thought you weren’t into that,” he says.

EJ shrugs, which doesn’t explain anything. “I get the sense that it’s a thing for you,” he says. He runs his tongue over his teeth, lingering especially in the fang area.

“It’s not a thing,” Nate says. He feels around with his feet for the sheet, but apparently he kicked it all the way off the bed earlier. “It’s something I’m professionally curious about.”

“Ohoho,” says EJ, sitting bolt upright. “Spin that one, Dogg. How does getting your veins bit promote hockey success?”

“What if my blood tastes weird to you and it turns out I’m iron deficient or something?” 

EJ flops over sideways. “You think I’m a doctor? You think I know what anemia blood tastes like? Blood is blood is blood, it all tastes bloody.”

Nate flicks him on the cold shoulder. “What, you didn’t get a medical degree in 1890 or something?”

EJ ignores him. “Like I’m gonna take one sip and say, ‘oh, oaky notes with a hint of sickle cell,’” he says. 

“Okay, I get it,” says Nate.

“Fruity finish. Good legs. High cholesterol,” says EJ.

“I swear to god,” Nate says, rolling over and clapping a throw pillow over the back of his head. EJ smacks his ass and mouths at his neck, and Nate full-body shivers.

“Mm. Tastes like platelets.”

Nate rolls all the way out of the bed.

+

Nate’s lingering in his kitchen, trying to remember the last time he ran the dishwasher, when his phone rings.

“Do you want to have an exciting new experience outside of your comfort zone?” EJ asks, before Nate can even say hello.

Nate is immediately suspicious. “Are you gonna be mad at me if I say no? Cause, like, no.”

“I think it’s pretty obvious that the correct answer to that question is ‘yes, of course, Erik, let’s do whatever it is _right now_.’”

“Don’t call yourself Erik,” says Nate. “It’s weird.”

“I’m in your driveway. Put on real pants, grab an iron and come outside.”

“How do you know I’m not already wearing real pants?” He wanders out of the kitchen and into the front hallway, in the spot sort of behind the stairs where he stands when he wants to see who’s at the door without them seeing him.

“If I thought anyone on this team was the kind of freak who wears jeans in their own house I would have asked for a trade long ago. Also, I can see you and your shitty joggers through the front door.”

“What?” Nate says. “No you can’t.” 

“Yes I can. You’re wearing all black and standing behind the big plant in your front hall.”

“No, are you kidding me? I’ve probably scared the shit out of thirty delivery guys, fuck.” The FedEx driver probably thinks he’s a serial killer. He’s never gonna be able to order anything or open the door to anyone ever again.

“Pants. Iron. Let’s go.”

“What’s the iron for? Where the fuck are you taking me?”

“Did I or did I not say let’s go? Look out the window.” Nate obeys. Through two windows’ worth of early afternoon glare, he can just about see EJ sitting in his car in Nate’s driveway, theatrically tapping his wristwatch. “Are you looking?”

So Nate goes and changes his pants and thinks about whether he should just get blackout curtains for all his windows and forget about the outside world entirely. A potential added bonus of blackout curtains is that maybe, if he had them, EJ would actually come inside his house instead of lingering in the driveway like he’s casing the place for a robbery. Nate’s house faces west, and it admittedly does get very sunny in the front rooms in the afternoon. He opens the closet where he keeps his golf clubs and pulls out a nine iron, which should be versatile enough for whatever weirdo shit EJ just roped him into. If they were just going golfing, he would have said. Probably.

+

EJ takes them south on 25, past the exit for the practice rink and into the deep suburbs where the guys with more than one kid live. “Now are you going to tell me where we’re going?” Nate asks, somewhere around the Dry Creek exit.

“Be patient,” says EJ.

“For real, where are you taking me?” Nate asks, as EJ inexplicably merges onto 470 East. “Why are we going to Nebraska?”

“Cool it,” EJ says. “We’re almost there.”

“This is a kidnapping,” Nate says. “I’m being abducted.” Subdivisions roll by outside the window. They’re practically on the fucking prairie, just scrub grass and big beige houses for miles. If Nate squints, he thinks he can almost see the Denver skyline in the distance, but it might also be a mirage. EJ hums an entirely different song than the one playing on the radio. It’s not so much a song as a collection of very obnoxious atonal notes, which gets progressively louder and louder until he pulls off the highway and into a strip mall parking lot. 

“What the fuck,” Nate says, looking between a Taco Bell and a fabric store and trying to guess which one EJ’s going to murder him behind. 

“Leave the golf club in the car, buddy,” EJ says, sliding the car into a parking spot outside a random storefront.

“What? Why did you even make me bring it?” Nate asks.

“Misdirection,” says EJ. He hops out of the car and slams the door behind him. Nate follows suit. “Also, for the record, when I said _iron_ I meant a _clothes_ iron.”

“Fuck off,” says Nate. They parked outside a restaurant called Twilight Bistro. There is nothing either golf or laundry related in sight.

“I just wanted to make sure you owned one of those, and I’m not reassured,” says EJ, ushering Nate through the restaurant’s door without letting him look at the menu posted in the window. It’s cool and dark inside, and a bell jingles when they walk in.

“Hey Erik,” the kid at the host stand says cheerfully. “Two for lunch?”

“Hey bud,” EJ says. “Two for lunch, just one tasting menu.”

The kid smiles, grabs two menus from different piles behind the stand, and leads them back into the restaurant. 

Nate elbows EJ and whispers, “_Hey bud._ You have no fucking clue what this kid’s name is, do you?”

“Shut up,” EJ hisses. “Also, he’s not a kid, he’s like seventy years old or something. Don’t be rude or he’ll stop giving me good tables.”

If Nate ignores the fact that they’re in a strip mall in Parker, the place is a perfectly decent restaurant: mood lighting, kitchen noises, tealights on the tables. The only thing that makes him a little suspicious is the weird gold bowl at each place setting. Namely, the fact that the seventy-year-old host kid whisks Nate’s bowl away the second after setting the menus down.

“Did I need that?” Nate asks.

EJ laughs. “No? Did you want it?” which doesn’t really clear anything up, until it does.

“Is this a vamp place?” Nate says under his breath, leaning across the table.

EJ laughs again, ignoring Nate’s lame attempt to be discreet and polite. “What tipped you off?” he asks.

If Nate’s going to be honest, it’s how dark the place is at lunchtime. It fits with Nate’s understanding of the vampy sense for the dramatic. It turns out that the tasting menu is a vamp-only experience, so Nate orders a salmon salad off the human menu and spends an entire meal watching EJ spit a broad selection of very strong-smelling bites into his little gold spittoon. It’s a pretty nice afternoon, actually.

+

The next day EJ comes over to Nate’s for lunch. Functionally, this means that Nate eats a veggie burger and chickpea pasta while EJ sits at the table and alternates watching Nate eat and doing crosswords. They have a deal where EJ doesn’t eat at Nate’s house, because Nate doesn’t like EJ spitting in his kitchen and EJ thinks all of Nate’s food is gross. It works out pretty well.

“Hey, EJ,” Nate says, completely casually once he’s mostly done with his meal. “Remember that thing you brought up the other day?”

EJ doesn’t look up from his crossword app. He’s got his glasses on, which is a bummer. It’s gonna be harder to have this conversation if EJ looks both hot and smart. “I talk a lot, buddy. Gonna have to be more specific.”

“The thing about, uh. Biting me.” Nate reaches up, uncomfortable, to rub at the back of his neck, and then thinks better of drawing attention to that general region of his body during this particular talk.

EJ snorts. “Ha. Right. That,” he says, which is not the response Nate was hoping for. To be fair, Nate was envisioning maybe something along the lines of ‘yes, of course, let’s do that right now and not talk about it either before or after,’ which is admittedly a lot to ask for.

“Yep, that,” he says, and then can’t think of anything to follow it up and EJ seems really focused on his crossword, so they sit in silence for a second. Nate cracks all of his knuckles individually to fill the space.

EJ clears his throat and Nate gets his hopes up, but then all EJ says is “Okay, a person who answers a question with a question. Seven letters.”

Nate checks to see if any of his knuckles need to be re-cracked. None of them do. “Starts with an E,” EJ says. “E blank blank S blank V blank.”

“Okay, just to clarify: do you remember that conversation. Did I dream that conversation.” EJ taps furiously at his phone. Nate waits. “Come on, dude, I gave you a yes or no question, I made this so easy.”

“Ha! Evasive,” says EJ.

“Yes,” says Nate. 

“Fourteen down is _evasive_,” EJ clarifies. Nate wrestles down the urge to steal EJ’s phone and throw it across the living room. He doesn’t actually do it, because he’s not ten years old. But he _wants _to. He thinks it would feel really, really good.

Sometimes Nate becomes very aware of the ways his brain works differently from EJ’s. Like he’s a herding dog and EJ is a flock of sheep, but the sheep hate being herded and do everything they can to resist the herding process, but Nate wants to herd them so bad, because otherwise he’ll lose his mind. That’s kind of a lot. He’s probably not gonna share this specific metaphor with EJ, because EJ would probably just respond by saying something cryptic and potentially untrue about sheep blood or the time he won the Westminster Dog Show in 1972. But it feels relevant.

“I remember,” says EJ, finally looking up from the crossword. 

“And?” says Nate, making direct eye contact with his coffee machine. It’s supposed to be able to make lattes, but he’s not sure how exactly that works.

“Y’know. I remember.”

“EJ. Buddy. Babe.”

“I know I talk a lot of shit about when stuff was or was not invented,” EJ says, and Nate nods because he will literally never forget the time his rookie year when EJ convinced him for several weeks that eggs were a new thing. 

“You talk all kinds of shit,” says Nate.

“Yeah, I do, but what I’m trying to say here is that dating was literally not invented until basically a century after I died.”

“What?” Nate doesn’t see what that has to do with anything, but he’ll roll with it.

“People just—got married! Or if they couldn’t do that they fucked in an alley and wrote tender letters back and forth for years,” EJ says. His voice is getting louder, crossword completely forgotten.

“Do you still have any of those tender letters?” Nate asks.

“Not the point, MacKinnon,” EJ huffs.

Nate leans in. “I’m just curious what years worth of tender letters from Erik Johnson would look like.”

“Anyway,” EJ says, almost shouting now.

“How come you never write _me_ any tender letters?”

EJ puts his head in his hands. “If you say tender letters one more time I’m gonna lose my mind.”

“Tender letters,” says Nate. It doesn’t even sound like words anymore, but it’s worth it for the way EJ groans.

+

It’s days before Nate realizes, sitting next to EJ on the bus back to the hotel after beating the Wild, that they never actually finished their conversation about whether or not he’s actually gonna get bit.

Nate takes a deep breath, lulled into a sense of security by the darkness and the road noise. “Okay, it’s not like I’m some super-sentimental guy, in terms of dating—”

“Hey, remember when you got your last girlfriend new wiper blades for Valentine’s and then told her that you saw it and it made you think of her?” says Compher, who is sitting a row behind them and who could at least do Nate the service of pretending he isn’t listening. Also, she had mentioned needing new wiper blades a few weeks before V-Day. And he bought her a nice dinner. All of which is not, actually, relevant to the fact that Nate is trying to talk to the person he’s currently dating, who obviously isn’t her.

“Fuck off,” says Nate. “Don’t eavesdrop.” 

“Don’t have private conversations on the bus,” Comph says.

“I feel like that’s fair, actually,” says EJ. 

“Not helpful. Neither of you is helping,” Nate says. 

“Did you, like, want us to?” Josty pipes up from the seat next to JT. “Wrong audience, my guy.”

“Fucking Christ,” says Nate, leaning back in his seat. EJ pats his thigh, a little too high up for the bus, and Nate swats his hand away.

“Sometimes I really wish I could fine you guys,” Josty says.

“Bitching about fines is a fine,” says EJ.

“Fuck you,” says Josty, but he settles back into his own row pretty quick.

The bus stops at a red light. A reflected beam from a streetlight shines on EJ’s forehead. In this lighting, he looks a little like a fancy marble statue, if marble statues had missing teeth and weird eyebrows and were ever sculpted crunched into a slightly-too-small bus seat.

“I think wiper blades are a pretty decent gift, actually,” EJ says. “Very practical.”

“_Thank_ you,” says Nate.

+

“Walk me to my room,” says EJ once the bus drops them at the hotel and the team disperses. If Nate remembers correctly, EJ’s room is two down from Nate’s own, but he’s game. So he follows EJ past exactly one piece of generic hotel hallway art and into EJ’s room, which looks exactly like Nate’s except for the big history book and the fake teeth on the nightstand.

EJ sits down at the desk and swivels his chair to face the room. “Okay, here’s the deal.” 

Nate is absolutely goddamn desperate to get the deal. “Lay it on me,” he says, sitting heavily on the unused bed. On the off-chance that EJ’s about to dramatically break up with him or something stupid like that, he’d rather not be sitting on a pillow that smells like his cologne.

“I don’t—well, it’s just that—okay, I fucking hate drinking blood.”

“What,” says Nate. He was expecting—something other than that. He would not have predicted that. “I thought that was pretty fundamental to being a vamp.”

“I have to do it,” says EJ, crossing his arms and nervously swiveling his chair. “I don’t have to like it.”

Nate thinks about EJ’s fridge full of what are fundamentally blood-filled Capri Suns. “Huh.”

“I don’t wanna be one of those woe-is-me, I’ve-been-cursed, every-day-I-turn-further-from-god’s-light assholes. Vampirism has been pretty decent overall, y’know?”

Nate nods. He doesn’t know if EJ realizes he’s doing his old Dutchy impression when he impersonates a woe-is-me asshole. 

“But raw blood is just—it’s gross, Dogg.”

“I mean, I’ll take your word for it?” Sure, Nate doesn’t personally find blood appealing, but he figured he would be down if he ever ended up as a vamp. He figured that was just how vamps operated. Though at this point, seven years into knowing EJ and three months into dating him, Nate should really know better than to make assumptions about vamps in general or EJ in specific.

“Like, the mouthfeel.” EJ shudders. “It’s foul.”

“Okay, back up, what the fuck is a mouthfeel—”

“—And the sensation of popping a vein with your teeth—look, I’m getting goosebumps just thinking about it.” He leans halfway out of his chair to shove an arm under Nate’s nose and prove that his hair is, in fact, standing on end. Nate didn’t know EJ was physically capable of getting goosebumps. He pats EJ’s arm.

“Well, yeah, when you put it like that, it sounds fuckin’ nasty,” Nate says.

“Yeah, I think so. Anyway, I bring this up because I do want to bite you.”

“That’s not super reassuring,” Nate says. He’s heard all of EJ’s weird tangents about his preference for synthetic blood and, specifically, the coffee-flavored kind, but he never thought that was a _thing_. Nate’s not a blood expert

“Because I know you want to try it. Like, I want you to be happy more than I hate the taste of blood, basically. I just wanted to let you know the math I’m doing here.” 

That’s actually very nice, and Nate doesn’t know what to say besides, “Oh, chill.” He tries to infuse that statement with the right amount of affection and appreciation. He’s not sure if it works, but EJ relaxes a little in his chair, so Nate will consider it a success.

+

The stadium game goes off with very few hitches overall. Nate doesn’t count losing 3-1 to the Kings as a hitch so much as a deeply embarrassing personal failure, but it is sort of fun to play in the open air. He gets a new hat out of the deal, at least. The whole team gets manic with the excitement and the attention and the thrill of putting Comph’s pasty undead ass up on Insta. After the game EJ turns all his million patio heaters on and has the guys over over to drink and yell in his backyard, and the whole night he keeps unsubtly brushing Nate’s neck with his cold hands.

Nate passes out in EJ’s bed and wakes up in the morning, hungover as fuck, to hear EJ clattering around in the en suite bathroom. EJ’s muttering, but all Nate can pick up over the low roar of the bathroom fan is “fuck,” several times. 

“What’s wrong,” Nate says into the pillow. “Why’re you being so fuckin’ loud.”

“I’m gonna sue the league,” EJ yells.

“Okay, but can you turn off the fan first?” Nate says. He squints miserably at EJ’s dumb analog alarm clock until he can figure out that it’s barely 7 AM. Nate asked EJ once if vamps actually needed to sleep, and he just shrugged and said _maybe_ in a really obnoxious tone.

“I’m suing the league, and then the US Air Force, and _then_ the manufacturers of SPF 200.”

“Uh oh,” says Nate.

“Don’t laugh,” EJ says. He sticks his head out of the bathroom door. Nate laughs. There’s no way he can do anything but laugh, because EJ is currently sporting the worst sunburn Nate’s ever seen, and Nate himself is very pale. EJ’s whole face is glowing painfully red except for two crisp, pale rectangles on his cheekbones where his eyeblack was. Nate laughs really hard.

“This is why vampires don’t particularly care for the sun,” EJ says, ducking back into the bathroom. “And I’m all out of aloe lotion, fuck.”

Nate tries and fails to stop laughing. He tries to stifle it in his pillow, which works a little better.

“I was thinking maybe I could bite you today,” EJ says over the fan, which he still has not turned off. “But we’re gonna have to postpone, because I can’t take myself seriously like this.”

Nate doesn’t have a face built for pouting, but he’s dazedly hungover enough to try it.

“Nathan, I cannot overstate how much my face hurts right now.”

“Worth a shot,” Nate says. He fishes around for his phone, which he’s pretty sure he last saw around 3 AM under EJ’s pillow. “Will you feel better by Wednesday? Because I’m pretty sure both of us are free that night.”

EJ grunts from the bathroom, which Nate interprets as a yes. He pulls his phone out from the inside of EJ’s pillowcase and makes a new event on his calendar. Coded purple, for “Personal,” as opposed to green for “Media” or red for “Avs.”

“Why isn’t there a teeth emoji?” Nate asks, after blocking off six hours of his Wednesday night. He has genuinely no idea how long biting takes, but better safe than sorry, time-wise. He’s a busy guy.

“Because it would be creepy, and no one would use it,” EJ says.

“Well I’d use it,” Nate grumbles. “My calendar is shared with my agent and I’m trying to be subtle about my personal life on here.”

“What, Brisson’s gonna get freaked out by a little bit of blood drinking between two consenting adults?” EJ reemerges from the bathroom with a thick white layer of what looks like toothpaste smeared across his face.

“My calendar is also shared with my mom.”

“Oh, well, in that case, bat emoji. Duh.” Duh.

“Cool, we’re set for Wednesday,” Nate says. “I shared the event details with you, even though I know you’re not gonna look at it.” EJ prefers paper calendars, like the very very old man he is.

EJ slides back into bed. He’s still wearing socks, out of consideration for Nate’s hatred of cold feet in bed. Nate has made his peace with cold everything else. EJ leans in for a kiss, but his face smells suspiciously minty.

Nate wards him off with a hand. “What the fuck did you put on your face?”

“Old vampire remedy for sunburn,” EJ says.

“Just tell me it’s not toothpaste and then we can fuck.”

EJ hesitates. “Okay, I said it’s an old vampire remedy.”

“Nope,” says Nate, rolling over.

+

Nate pries himself out of EJ’s bed two hours later, planning to go to Target to get EJ after-sun lotion. EJ refused to come, which is, in Nate’s opinion, fair. He wouldn’t want to show his face either, if his face looked like that. His shoes logically have to be somewhere near the back door, and he’s valiantly searching when he nearly trips over Andre on the floor in front of the couch. 

“Hi Mack,” Andre says.

“Holy shit,” says Nate, who definitely thought he was alone. He almost drops the travel mug of lukewarm water he’s clutching like the lifeline it is.

“How’s it going?” Andre asks. His hair is flat on one side, and he looks generally clammy. Nate decides not to worry about why exactly he was on the floor.

“You want a ride home, bud?” Nate asks in return.

“I think that would be good,” Andre says, nodding, so Nate adds another errand to his mental list. His shoes aren’t directly in front of his face, so he gives up and puts on a pair of New Balances that are either EJ’s or Colin’s. Either way, they fit badly but they’ll get him in and out of Target.

The nearest store is between EJ’s house and Andre’s place, so once he’s gotten Andre first standing, then walking, then in the car, Nate asks, “Wanna come run some errands?” 

“Sure,” Andre says cheerfully. It’s pretty easy to make Andre happy. He just likes to be included.

“I think you have some toothpaste on your face,” Andre says, gesturing vaguely at a spot on his own cheekbone.

Nate flips open the mirror on the sunshade. Sure enough, there’s a bluish-white smear of toothpaste on his cheek. “Shit, that must have been EJ.”

“Hmm,” says Andre. “What’s it like to date an older man?”

“What?” Nate says. “EJ’s not that much older.”

Andre coughs politely. “I know it’s rude to ask a vampire’s age, but I thought EJ was three hundred years old.”

“He’s, like, a hundred ninety max. And emotionally he’s stuck at thirty.” Nate has literally never thought about his relationship with EJ in that context, and he’s not about to start now.

“I see,” says Andre. He sounds like he’s insinuating something. Nate takes a hard left into the Target parking lot and does not say anything else until they get to the lotion aisle.

“Which brand should I get?” Nate asks Andre. All he wants is to make conversation about anything in the world that isn’t older men.

Andre shrugs. “I’ve never bought it. I don’t burn, I just tan.” Nate just grabs the bottle that says “aloe” the most times.

+

Nate feels like it isn’t weird to be intimidated by the sheer number of towels EJ has piled up on and around his bed. Wednesday sort of crept up on him, but the day is here, EJ’s sunburn is fading, and Nate’s finally gonna get fucking bit.

“Do you need, like, a spit bucket or something?” Nate asks.

EJ looks up from where he’s repositioning a rolled up towel and grimaces. “Gross. For what?”

“For spitting, if you hate raw blood. You don’t have to actually drink mine.” It seems pretty straightforward to Nate. It would probably be weird to see EJ spit mouthfuls of Nate’s own blood into a cup or whatever, but he’s seen EJ do worse. He saw EJ do worse literally yesterday, vamp-eating an entire mango. It was an extremely wet process. Nate could definitely manage in exchange for getting bit.

EJ looks deeply affronted by the suggestion. “The fuck? I’m not that much of an asshole.”

“I mean, I’m just trying to make sure that you’re, like. Comfortable.”

EJ scrunches up his face. “Not to bring the mood down, but vampires don’t like to waste blood. Good ones, anyway. And I respect you too much to throw away your _blood_.”

“Oh, okay,” says Nate.

“I mean, it’s your _blood_,” EJ says, as though that clarifies anything. “_Your_ blood.”

Nate shrugs, suddenly very aware of the way his neck moves when he does it. “Whatever works.”

EJ rolls his eyes. “Shall we?” he asks, in an exaggerated vampy accent with unfortunate twinges of American Midwest.

The experience of getting bitten is admittedly not as sexy as Nate was envisioning. Mostly what it is is warm, which in itself is sort of weird. He and EJ have never really done tenderness before. EJ settles the both of them down in his carefully crafted towel nest and then proceeds to give Nate the most thoroughly relaxing neck, shoulder, and scalp massage he’s ever received. Nate is very bodily aware, but EJ gets to knots in muscles Nate didn’t even know he had.

“Mmf,” says Nate.

“If you tense up too much while I’m biting, I could puncture your trachea,” EJ explains. Nate’s so loose that information barely even freaks him out.

“Okay then,” EJ says. He presses his mouth to Nate’s neck. Then there’s a sharp pain that feels like a cortisone shot on his neck but also not at all like that, and then just—warmth. He’s not sure how long it goes on for, but he feels floaty and nice, and EJ’s hand is on his jaw.

Eventually EJ detaches with an unfortunate slobbery sound. “Sorry, this part is always disgusting,” he says, licking blood off his lips. He blots Nate’s neck with a tissue. If all he needs to clean up is a tissue, the towels seem like overkill.

“Pullout game,” Nate says vaguely. The warmth is lingering. EJ laughs.

“Want a Gatorade?” EJ asks. “I got one out of the fridge ahead of time.”

“How’d my blood taste?” Nate asks. 

“Like blood. Drink your Gatorade,” EJ says, but he runs his hand over the short hair above Nate’s ear while Nate drinks, and he only leaves the bed to politely spit a stolen sip of Gatorade into the bathroom sink.

+

“Nate, buddy,” Gabe says in the room the next day. “What the fuck happened to your neck?”

“What about my neck?” Nate says serenely.

Gabe laughs. “Uh, the giant fucking bruise, dude. ”

“I have literally no idea what you’re talking about,” Nate says.

He does not wear a turtleneck to the game that night.

**Author's Note:**

> idk yall, i got so many wips and this is just what Happened. my quest to make vampires unsexy continues. fully didn't even read it through before i posted it, so let me know if there are any really glaring typos. 
> 
> i'm softbarrie on tumblr, come say hey.


End file.
